Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg

Schulberg, Budd (Budd Wilson Schulberg), 1914-2009, American writer, b. New York City, grad. Dartmouth (1936). Because his father was an executive at Paramount Studios, Schulberg could observe the corruption of the film industry. His novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) is about the rise of a ruthlessly ambitious film magnate. Among his other novels are The Harder They Fall (1947), The Disenchanted (1950, play 1958), and Sanctuary V (1969). He wrote the stories and screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954), which won him an Academy Award, and for A Face in the Crowd (1957), both directed by Elia Kazan. Schulberg also helped found the Douglass House Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and New York's Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center (1971).

In 1950 Schulberg published a novel, The Disenchanted, about a young screenwriter who collaborates on a screenplay about a college winter festival with a famous novelist at the nadir of his career. The novelist (who at the time was assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald, dead ten years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic and flawed figure, with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned. According to the New York Times, it was the tenth bestselling novel in the United States in 1950. The Disenchanted was adapted as a Broadway play in 1958 starring Jason Robards, Jr. (who won a Tony Award for his performance) and George Grizzard as the character loosely based on Schulberg. Also in 1958, he wrote and co-produced (with his younger brother Stuart) the film Wind Across the Everglades, directed by Nicholas Ray.

Schulberg encountered political controversy in 1951 when screenwriter Richard Collins, testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee, named Schulberg as a former member of the Communist Party. Schulberg immediately volunteered to testify and appeared as a friendly witness. He testified that Party members had sought to influence the content of What Makes Sammy Run and "named names" of other alleged Hollywood communists.

In 1965, after a devastating riot had ripped apart the fabric of the Watts community in Los Angeles, Schulberg formed the Watts Writers Workshop as an attempt to ameliorate frustrations and bring artistic training to the economically impoverished district.